Keeping up with the Joneses

For the first time in 6 years, the Links With Locals summer golf column was a true road game this week.

As part of a week-long vacation through the southeastern part of the United States, I had the pleasure of teeing it up with a pair of high school buddies: Mike Jones, and his younger brother, Dan, both of whom recently relocated to Georgia.

We played Saturday at Oak Mountain Golf Club in Carrollton, Georgia.

Mike, or “Jonesey,” as I’ve called him since junior high school, has been as good of a friend as a person can have, and we’ve been tight going on 40 years now. We were partners in backyard basketball games against two other great friends, Bob Mool and Don Becker, and partners in the card game “pitch” that we played during lunch hour in high school, as well as before feasting on chicken and pizza at our beloved Sip ’N Snack near Mendota – our once-a-week hangout (always on Wednesday night) that we still frequent once in a while.

Golf also brought Jonesey and me together. We were on the same Amboy High School team for 4 years, and while I cleaned his clock on a regular basis, he did defeat me once, during a dual match our senior year at the former Oregon Country Club. He still has the scorecard to commemorate that feat.

Golf, as it turned out, became a career for Jonesey. He began working on the grounds crew at Shady Oaks in 1977 – just down the road from his house in Sublette, and he hasn’t stopped since.

He was at Shady Oaks from 1977-85, Rockford Country Club (1985-87), Olympia Fields Country Club (1987-88), Fort Wayne (Ind.) Country Club (1988-90), South Bend (Ind.) Country Club (1990-94), Lochmoor Club in Grosse Point, Mich. (1994-2007), Effingham Country Club (2008-16) and Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex in West Lafayette, Ind. (2016-17), where the Purdue University golf teams play.

I had the pleasure of playing all but Olympia Fields among Jonesey’s stops. Each place was great in its own way, and it’s because of the way he tended to the golf course. It was like his child. It was nothing for him to be at work from dawn to dusk, dealing with issues that cropped up, or more importantly, nipping them in the bud before they started.

All those crazy work weeks took a toll, however, and when an opportunity came about to get into a new line of work, but still in the golf industry, Jonesey took it.

He is now a contract sales representative for BASF, which provides chemicals that superintendents use to keep golf courses healthy. Jonesey’s territory is Georgia (including Augusta National), Alabama and Tennessee, and he’s out on the road a good chunk of the time, maybe 3 or 4 days a week, while working out of his home in Newnan, Georgia, 1 day a week. He’s got weekends off – an unthinkable benefit while working as a superintendent.

Jonesey isn’t really a saleman – there’s other people to do that. His job is to schmooze with the superintendents – take them to baseball games or NASCAR races, or whatever they’re into. There is one group that he’ll be taking to shoot clay pigeons, while another group will be golfing at the famed Pinehurst No. 2 course in North Carolina in the coming weeks.

No job is stress-free, but after decades of fretting about conditions of the golf course he was responsible for, Jonesey has found a new calling, and he’s loving it. He lives in an awesome home in Newnan with his wife of 18 years, Ellen; his well-trained dog, Scout; and a rodent-tracking cat, Hunter.

About 20 miles down the road from Newnan is Carrollton, where Dan Jones resides. He is the vice president of retail sales for Southwire Company, which is North America’s leading manufacturer of wire and cable used in the distribution and transmission of electricity. According to its website, one in three new homes built in the United States contains wire made by Southwire.

Dan had worked for 15 years in Gurnee for Coleman Cable, which falls under the Southwire umbrella, before taking the job in Carrollton earlier this summer.

Mike and Dan had been separated for 36 years, when Mike left for college at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1983, before fate brought them together once again just outside of Atlanta. They lived in an apartment in Carrollton for about a month, until Mike brought his house in early June. Dan then lived with Mike and Ellen for a few weeks before Dan bought his house, just off the third hole at Oak Mountain Golf Club, in late June.

Dan and his wife of 23 years, Lara, are still settling into that house with their three children: Delaney, 18; Justin, 15; and Collin, 15. Here’s a few interesting tidbits about the Jones children.

Delaney is named after a Jimmy Buffett song, “Delaney Talks to Statues,” from the 1994 album “Fruitcakes.” In 1996, Dan and Lara went on a trip to Key West, heard that song, it touched their hearts, and the rest is history. Delaney will be a freshman at Georgia Southern University this fall.

Collin had been a top long-distance runner at Gurnee Warren High School as a freshman, and is expected to follow in those footsteps this fall at Carrollton, a Georgia high school powerhouse. Carrollton hosts the state cross country finals each fall.

Justin is the swimmer in the family, and he also plays water polo. He currently swims for the Carrollton Bluefins Swim Club, and will also swim for his high school team.

Until Saturday, Dan had not played at Oak Mountain Golf Club, despite living on the course. He had played Carrollton’s other course, Sunset Hills, but wanted to try out Oak Mountain before deciding where to join as a member, as he wants the family to get into golf.

A tidbit about Oak Mountain Golf Club: It is owned by Frank Mack Skinner, who won $133 million in the Georgia State Lottery back in 2008. He said in an interview his big purchase was going to be season tickets for Atlanta Falcons games – 24 of them, for his entire family.

He also bought the golf course, to ensure residents of Carrollton, his hometown, would always have a decent place to play golf.

The layout of Oak Mountain was really cool – elevation changes, lakes and ponds for scenery and to avoid, generous fairways and playable rough. The only issue was the greens, which hadn’t recovered yet from a spate of recent storms, including one that dumped 5 inches of rain in an hour. The greens should heal with time, however, and then Oak Mountain will get a full thumbs up from me.

As for the golf, yours truly had his rare ‘A’ game working, and I got around the 6,615-yard layout in a 3-under-par 69. Usually the first time I see a course, breaking 80 is fine, and going lower than that is better. I guess good company helped me out.

Dan, who couldn’t have been a better host, finished with a 95. He noted he hadn’t played a lot of golf in recent years, due to a heavy travel schedule. Now that he lives on a course, he hopes to tee it up much more often with his family.

As for Jonesey, he also hadn’t played too much golf, despite being around the game constantly. A few wayward drives were costly, but he still kept it in double digits with a 99. Making sure other golfers have good courses to play on are his priority.

—

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one other vacation outing, a trip to Rome, Georgia for a low Class A baseball game between the Rome Braves and the Columbia Fireflies. They are affiliated with the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets, respectively, and compete in the Southern Division of the South Atlantic League.

For a mere $18, my wife, Gwen, and I had the best seats in the house, down the third-base line, about 10 rows up, on a perfect Georgia evening. The Braves burned the Fireflies 14-5 behind the hot bat of catcher William Contreras, younger brother of Chicago Cubs catcher Willson Contreras. All William did in this game was go 4-for-5 with a triple and two doubles, drive in five runs and score twice.

Who knows – maybe William Contreras will be catching for the Atlanta Braves someday!

We also had the pleasure of sitting behind two gentlemen, Randy Van Horn and his brother, John Van Horn, who have been season ticket holders for the Rome Braves since the franchise began 16 years ago. They rarely miss games, and we talked the whole game. We talked about newspapers, the Georgia Bulldogs, the Fighting Illini, old Rome Braves highlights – a little bit of everything. They even bought me a souvenir program – a nice touch of southern hospitality.

Throw in the added attraction of it being Superhero night (Wonder Woman was especially fetching!), Thirsty Thursday (cheap drinks – yeah!) and Gwen catching a hot dog flung from the team mascot, and it was an awesome night.